11/21/12

people have
visited my page!

Sender of the world's first SMS.

Hi, I'm Neil Papworth. I was born and raised in
Reading, UK. I studied computing and started my career at Ferranti
International in Bracknell, designing and programming a movable vehicle
satellite antenna and implementing software for automated helicopter landing
aids.

In 1991, I moved to Sema Group Telecoms, and it's with them
that on December 3rd, 1992, I sent the world's first ever text message.
I was part of the team developing a Short Message Service Centre (SMSC) for
our customer, Vodafone UK, and was chosen to go to their Newbury site to
install, integrate and test the software and get it all working.
Initially the idea was for them to use it essentially as a paging service -
no-one had any idea how gigantic the texting phenomenon would become.

Since mobile phones didn't yet have keyboards, I typed the
message out on a PC. It read, "Merry Christmas," and I sent it to
Richard Jarvis of Vodafone, who was enjoying his office Christmas party at
the time.

I remained with Sema Group and its successors (SchlumbergerSema,
Airwide Solutions) for many years as a software developer, then a designer,
and later a product architect, living and working all over the world, from
Singapore and Sydney to Seattle and Toronto. Texting didn't really
take off until some years later, once handsets were able to both send and
receive and people could send SMS to their friends on different networks.
The first media attention I remember the event receiving was when the BBC
News website marked the
10th anniversary of the first text. Since
then, I've given radio interviews, been flown to London with my family for a
movie premiere, featured in a Super
Bowl ad, been an answer to a Jeopardy question and had articles written
on the achievement in newspapers from The Sun to the
Times of India and the Montreal Gazette.

I now live in Montreal with my wife and three kids and work
as a software architect for Oracle on
their subscriber database solutions. I follow Formula 1 racing and the
latest developments in science and technology, and I enjoy travel, beer and
curry*!